By Professor Anastasios M. Tamis*
In a recent poll conducted in Australia among a thousand surveyed young people aged between 18 and 25, posed with the key question “if Australia were attacked, like Ukraine, by a foreign aggressor, would you stand and fight against the invader, or would you prefer to abstain”, forty out of a hundred of young citizens declared their preference for absconding, rather than defending their own country. Almost half of our young people would prefer to leave the battlefields, and escape to a safe place, away from the war fronts.
The research finding concluded that forty out of one hundred of our young people are not prepared to defend the country and, hence, are followers of “the one who saves himself is saved”. This expression, which represents one of the most controversial historically recorded exhortations that declare self-love and self-centric attitudes, had been the phrase uttered by priestess Pythia of the Oracle of Delphi in 480 BC.
This extremely disturbing finding of research that characterizes the modern youth of Australia, the hope and the future of the country, whose ideal is the Delphic “to save yourself” as their ideal, emerges as a stark contrast to the modern history of Australia and causes emotional and ideological aphasia.
Australia is the country that, traditionally and consistently, pays an immense tribute to its dead soldiers who fell on the battlefields of the world, from the Pacific and the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, offering on the altar of freedom profusely its children on the fronts of Africa, Europe, and Greece. The Australian soldiers were the ones who, alongside with the Greeks and the British, resisted with selflessness against the German-Italian invaders in the last resistance battles of Vevi and Aliakmon (12-13 April 1941), before the final Triple Occupation of the country, a few days later.
War Musea, Shrines of Remembrance, Cenotaphs, Obelisks of Honour and Remembrance, and even a special Ministry for its Veteran Soldiers and freedom fighters have been erected by the Commonwealth of Australia. Only in few other countries of the world we have experienced so many monuments to adorn the national dignity of the country, to be displayed by the State and its agencies, as well as the institutions that represent this unadorned respect for the dead, the fallen and those who fought and survived.
Australia is perhaps the only case of a country that, while it was not substantially invaded by a hostile country (if we ignore the Japanese “special military operation” in Darwin and the port of Sydney), since 1903, it has been sending its children to Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific to become national martyrs, so that the successive generations could remain free.
Every year, Australia and Australians, continuously and without exception, organize honorary all-day events for the ANZACs; officially celebrate the end of the First Great War, on 11th of November; prepare impressive collective appearance of thousands of descendants of those who were slaughtered in Gallipoli by the Turks and lay wreaths at the Monuments and Obelisks in towns and villages, with prayers and religious ceremonies.
Why, then, this comparative indolence, the “ohaderphism”, the zemanfudism of its young people forty per cent? What is the reason for the idleness, this indolence? Is it a self-indulgence, the dullness that essentially dominates this dangerous minority of those indulging in the slogan of “munch, doze, pee and stroll”? Is it a norm, an impediment, a national disadvantage, devious shrewdness, perhaps heretical and incompatible otherness? Are they socially and educationally disadvantaged young people, crafty egotists, arrogant, cunning, and big-headed bodgies?
How is it possible that forty out of a hundred young Australians become voluptuous victims of suicide by not accepting and protecting their own history, their own culture, their own language, their own homes, and altars (family and faith) and whatever core values that the freedom of a country hides within its meaning. Many of the ancestors of these nihilist and dissenting young Australians, surely sacrificed themselves in muddy trenches, or quenched from hunger and thirst in tropical jungles of the Pacific, so that their descendants could express their opinion, even reaching the stage of condemning and adulterating the memory of their forefathers.
My humble opinion is that most of those who have declared absconding, that is desertion from the defense of their country are neither repudiators nor naysayers. They are certainly consistent supporters of the mental and ideological independence from traditional ideological taboos, negators of customs and legacies which have been eradicated under the savage attack of consumerism and the analgesia of those who feel satiated, those who feel saturated, the content egomaniac, the indifferent citizen, the individualist, a person without sensitivity towards any conquest or any success. The goods for them are not conquered.
They are provided profusely, without protest, consistently, almost for three generations now. Seventy years without any real pressure from hunger, poverty, wars, political instability. Seventy years without “rainy” days, seventy years with prosperity within reason.
The young people of forty per cent now take their freedom for granted. The mobile phone in the cockerel, the cappuccino in hand, the pocket money in the form of a fixed allowance in the pocket, the bed laid by mom, the food on the table, the shirt ironed, the future secured. Previous generations worked hard in factories and quarries, in fabrics and foundries, others in construction and behind the cauldrons with boiled fat cutting and throwing potatoes and fish. The predecessors worked hard, they left them properties and wealth, one or two or three houses, they became landowners, multi-store proprietors and industrialists. Most of them gave up their studies to take into their own hands the inheritance of the parents (very rarely the children of the wealthy study or finish a university).
Afterall, they do not need to enhance their education. Their grandparents and parents took care and left them wealth and properties; their ancestors enriched them with businesses and factories and affluence. Thus, many of their children who oppose the defense of the homeland, became trouble-free voracious and self-centered creatures.
Why, then, should they fight? Why should they defend themselves. This is not their role. This is the duty of the morons and the cretins. Let those who were the victims of a traditional education to fight for their country. Those blockheaded who were taught “outrageously” that the individual must possess a civil conscious and obey the laws and the institutions of the State. Let those fight for the homeland, the idealists, and the romantics.
Self-sacrifice in action is only for the proletariat, for the ignorant, the persons of low intelligence, the conceptually deprived. Of course, we will not use as our model the stupid Socrates, who, although he could escape and be saved from execution, preferred consciously, voluntarily, as a conscious citizen, to stay in prison, to drink the hemlock, to die, because this was the mandate and the decision of the institutions of his homeland, because the value of the State Laws was more precious than his own life. What a buffoon!
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